Impossibly Small Spaces

by Lisa C. Taylor

The stories in Impossibly Small Spaces write you into a world that is very much today's America. Intensely lyrical, it is brimming with characters whose lives are being shaped by the strictures of their own inadequacies. As in her first collection, Lisa tackles such emotive topics as death, adoption, breast surgery, and rape with subtle intensity. Here are stories where the characrters are either physically or emotionally scarred. They don't know who they are and spend their time trying to prove they exist, often in impossibly small spaces. She gives voice to people holidng onto past hurts, who are not able to talk to one another. Here we meet a young girl who is returned to the orphanage "like a pair of shoes that didn't fit right", or another who dreams an afterlife where the missing parts will find her. One of the significant things about this book is that even with such tough themes, they are not without humor or hope. Hugely perceptive, sizzling with electric images, this is top-class writing where grace and precision are brought to bear on lives that glow brightly in the reader's mind long after the last page. (Geraldine Mills, author of Gold and Hellkite)

146 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2015

About the author

Lisa C. Taylor is the author of a novel, The Shape of What Remains, was released on February 18, 2025. This novel tackles one woman's journey back to life after the unexpected death of her child. The novel is listed on Kindle for $0.99 and available now. She is also the author of a collection of poetry, Interrogation of Morning (2022), two short story collections, Impossibly Small Spaces (2018) and Growing a New Tail (2015) and two other collections of poetry, including Necessary Silence (2013, Arlen House/Syracuse University Press). Both her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She's been a finalist in many contests and recently won the Hugo House New Works Award for short fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies including Tahoma Literary Review, Lily Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, MER VOX, Live Encounters, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Women's Art Quarterly Journal, Crack the Spine Anthology, Worcester Review, Crannog, and Sky Island Journal. She was a January 2015 spotlight feature for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and was a mentor in their writer-to-writer program. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Writing as well as an MA. She teaches creative writing online and offers private workshops and mentoring. She is the co-director of the Mesa Verde Writers Conference and Literary Festival.

Reviews

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple meets at the airport. No, not how you might think. They are both there to greet arriving passengers on a plane. Except the plane crashes. And Carol and Errol turn to each other. (I mean, quickly.) Together in grief, they forge a relationship. Errol’s lost his wife on what was to be their sixth anniversary. She was three months pregnant so Errol lost two people, “one just a sliver of life on the ultrasound.” Carol had lost her husband to another man. The story, “Salt and Blue,” is brisk bit of healing. And wondering.

In “Scientia,” a pharmacist named Carla is facing a revolt by her fingers and limbs—a right forefinger stops working, an ankle gives out while skiing. She banters with carefree Carlos, a pharmacy student who wants her to come to Puerto Rico or some sunny clime and open a drug store. Carla is more practical.

“Carlos texted me a picture of himself eating fried plantains and sofrito. He was wearing giant sunglasses. I told him I had to work tomorrow. My loans would eat up my income for the next 20 years. When I was an adequately-compensated pharmacist I would think about vacations that didn’t include moldy-looking sofrito.”

But it turns out that Carla’s body knows best and her limbs behave when it gets what it wants.

And the funny and poignant title story, “Impossibly Small Spaces,” starts like this:

“My muscles had just started to unclench when the airplane bathroom door opened. I hid the vape pen behind my back.

‘Sorry,’ he took a few backward steps. I grabbed him by his loose-fitting sweatshirt and closed the door.”

Hildy is the one with the vape pen in the airplane bathroom. She lives in a remote Colorado cabin without indoor plumbing and is on her way to visit a friend in Florida, preferrable to the miserable conditions in the old homestead home where she hears things and fears bears. “I recorded a message once a week just to hear my own voice and establish proof of my own existence.”

The guy Hildy pulls into the bathroom is Neil, on his way to Florida to win custody of his daughter from an ex. Hildy thinks about her relationship with her dead mother, who drank herself to death. Neil thinks about the mistakes he made raising his daughter. “Impossibly Small Spaces” impossibly covers a host of issues in its few fast pages—parenting, reinvention, do-overs, histories and futures, coincidence, fate, and so on.

None of these 17 stories give itself over to easy summarization. Lisa C. Taylor, who lives in Mancos, packs the narratives with the touch of a master distiller. We focus down to the essence of moments and characters intertwined. These are all meaty stories that reward re-reading. Love, babies, families, and pregnancies abound.

Taylor’s prose asks the reader to pay attention. Taylor is also a well-published poet. She’s won many awards and teaches writing online. Her fondness for words is apparent. The writing throughout “Impossibly Small Spaces” carries a sweet breeze of freshness with lots of humor. “My apartment is modest by modest standards.” “She returned me like a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right because I wasn’t her flesh and blood.” “The murkiness gave way to true darkness, rain intermittent but persistent enough that our conversation was punctuated by the swish and tap of the windshield wipers.”

We often start in full stride (such as the airplane bathroom scene) and leave before the race is finished. Taylor isn’t afraid to make us feel disoriented at first, but then catches us up—without any handholding whatsoever. Witness the opening paragraph of “Scorpion:”

“Not even nine o’clock and everything spinning like that doomed farmhouse in the Wizard of Oz. Metal against metal and then an explosion after the black Lexus plowed into the side of her car, glass strewn across the seat like confetti. Searing pain and a bang as the airbag inflated. She landed on her back in a clearing where Casey had once crouched in her favorite pink shorts to pick up a snakeskin, sneakers crunching over branches.”

Who wouldn’t want to read more?

Taylor engages us with characters often in crisis or at least at crossroads with secrets to discover or divulge. Read “Impossibly Small Spaces” and find your world expanding with every turn of the page.

[Linda Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of a wide range of stories, poignant , and thought Provoking .

[Luke Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa C. Taylor's writing is enchanting.

[Orliss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The goal of many artists is to bring to the conscious mind that which we overlook in our surroundings, in our minds, in our hearts as they are “deep inside the jacket of life”. I just read this book, given to me by a friend and found it delightful. Lisa C. Taylor showed me images from worlds I do not know. In New Skin there is the mottled surface of a tree bark that is brown and red with the blood of eight year old hands. In Ache Boulder there is a childhood that is spent locked in the trunk of a car. In Under the Bridge there is a woman with two dollars and no shoes who is weeping. I revel in the visions these poems provide, offering me the opportunity to glimpse the trials, the lives, the emotions of these people.
In Mouse a poem about the frantic and unconscious way we often live our lives, I have found what I believe to be three of the finest lines in modern literature.
“Vital world.
Lives catch under wheels.
I have to stop this rushing,
these continuous murders.”

Thank you Lisa, my eyes are slowly opening.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is quirky, surprising, and moving - a wonderful mix of the ordinary and the unpredictable, of resilience, humor, loss and redemption.

[Ken McManus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of stories!